Software Engineer salaries in 2018, tech levels, and lifestyle

By grad school, do you mean PhD? Master can be done in 1-2 years. If not ML, then what field?

Yes, PhDs. Master is way too short to learn anything that any good student with strong focus can pick up that much while in undergrad.

I donā€™t think Masters are good investment for educational purposes - but if you want to pick up couple more internships by delaying getting into industry, I think thatā€™s fine. And a lot of foreign students get their foot in the door by having a diploma from schools that recruiters have heard of.

swe/imaging/firmware

What kind of company?

I guess you are right on median age around 30.
However, these are statistical number.
I have been in HW architecture for quite some time and there are many individual contributors at age of 50 or even 60s.
It just occurs to me that one of my previous co-worker just joined FB. He is also 65 years old.
He was recruited by the team of many of our previous co-workers.
Technology evolves but most of them are based on old technology.
Thus, it is important to have in-depth knowledge in key technology.

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Imaging and Printing Labs. Now that I said printing you should be able to guess which company :wink:

HPQ

FB into hardware again?

Let me do a tally of all the original PayPal/X.com engineers:

  1. Russ Simmons: founded Yelp and quit years ago.
  2. Gausbeck: CTO of a startup last time I checked.
  3. Jawed Karim: quit after selling YouTube.
  4. Doug Ihde: still works at Facebook I think.
  5. Yu Pan: made tons of money from YouTube and now works as an engineer founder at a startup for fun.
  6. Dave Kang: still works at Facebook.
  7. Steve Chen: became cto founder for fun after selling YouTube.
  8. Eric Klein: works at Dropbox
  9. James hogan: invests in moonshot ideas using peter thielā€™s money. Might have struck it big with bitcoin.
  10. Brandon foster: retired and became RE investor in Denver.
  11. Scott Alexander: moved to LA and joined Elonā€™s workforce.
  12. Doug mak: still works at Max Levchinā€™s startup.
  13. Sougou: still works at YouTube.
  14. Nhon: quit a long time ago. Heā€™s an older guy who owns a house in PA since the 90s.
  15. Sang: quit before PayPal IPO and missed a fortune. However owns a mansion in WSJ.
  16. Nick/Todd/Jeff: they were the X.com engineers fighting with PayPal and all quit before PayPal IPO. I donā€™t think any of them is doing particularly well.
  17. Me: you already know how Iā€™m doing :slight_smile:
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Damn. I forgot to mention Jeremy Stoppleman but he needs no introduction :smile:

Actually no. Can you elaborate? :smile:

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I retired and became an RE investor. :smile:

NOPE. $500,000 * 5 * 50% = $1,250,000.

You do know SWEs have to pay taxes right?

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Link in OP is removed!!! No problem, there is a similar one in quora.

Whatā€™s the salary like for senior and staff engineers at Google in Seattle and Mountain View?

When you start out at Google as a L3, your total compensation totals about 170k/yr, with about 115kish base salary. It ramps up a few percentage points a year, until you get promoted to L4, at which point your salary is around 150k/yr with total comp landing in the 230k ballpark. At L5, which is the senior engineer level, you will make around 330k/yr total comp, with base salary around 190k. Then at L6, staff engineer, 220k base salary, total comp 400k+. These are just the rough ballpark numbers, and may vary a bit based on performance.

26%20PM

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So 400k total is kind of the cap for most engineers. Many of them will never exceed L6 or even reach L6

Couple would be $800k :slight_smile: after 5-6 years upon graduation. Insanely high :slight_smile:
Total comp can be quite high at the point of vesting. Above is at the point of allocating.
I did a simple computation, the difference in value of RSUs between holding upon vesting and sell upon vesting is 300% :slight_smile: because of the fast rising stock price in the last 8 years.

What about L1 and L2? Interns and janitors?

T is about to go L7.

Are you envious?